CITY ROOM; Zen for High Schoolers: 'Notice the Anxiety. Notice the Fear.'

By AIDAN GARDINER

Published: April 16, 2012

CORRECTION APPENDED

La-keeyatta Steward, 17, sat on a small black pillow one recent Tuesday afternoon, her legs tucked under her. Her meditation instructor told her to imagine her body pulled upward by a string, so she lowered her shoulders and straightened her back.

Then two of her classmates burst in.

''There was a brawl,'' called Ian Alsopp, 18, shaking his head. ''It went down. It went down.''

Riding the subway after school, he said, he saw about 20 teenagers beat up another boy.

The news startled Ms. Steward and the other high school students at the Brooklyn Zen Center, where they attend weekly meditation sessions meant to help them handle the challenges of growing up in the city.

''This is where you actually use this,'' the instructor, Greg Snyder, told Mr. Alsopp. ''Notice the thought. That's fine. Notice the anxiety. Notice the fear. Use the meditation to focus your mind. Are you with me?''

''I'm with you,'' Mr. Alsopp said before settling onto his pillow, still fidgeting.

Mr. Snyder is a Zen Buddhist priest who leads the center, a converted loft with pristine white walls and exposed beams set in a small industrial building near the Gowanus Canal. The center collaborates with the Brooklyn College Community Partnership, a non-profit education organization, on the Awake Youth Project, which includes weekly workshops in five public high schools and teenager-led sessions at the center.
Now, Mr. Snyder is taking on the tougher task of teaching meditation to Level 1 offenders- students who are frequently put in detention or suspended because they start fights or cause trouble - at Bushwick High School. Administrators at the school approved the program April 5 and plan to start it in coming weeks.

Students in trouble are given the choice of traditional punishments or participating in the meditation program, where Mr. Snyder will teach them how to meditate, understand volatile emotions and curb impulsive behavior. He intends to take the program to other schools as well.

Mr. Snyder is part of a growing group of educators, practitioners and lawmakers pushing to replace discipline tactics in public schools that they say do not improve behavior and disproportionately target minority students, putting them at a greater academic disadvantage.

''If detention or suspension were effective, you'd expect those rates to decrease over the school year,'' said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University. ''Suspension doesn't change anything. It doesn't teach kids anything that would change their behavior.''

The after-school group at the center was founded by Ms. Steward, a student at Jefferson High School in East New York, and some other teenagers after they took a paid internship at the center through a Brooklyn College Community Partnership program. She said she was immediately drawn to meditation and wanted to include her peers.

''You notice yourself and find out what kind of a person you really are,'' Ms. Steward said. ''I've always been happy, but now I think I'm positive.''

Ms. Steward, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, one of six children raised by a mother who works with the mentally impaired, said that meditation helped her deal with tensions at school and with her mother at home.

''It's hard, because she has to go work with them and then comes back to us,'' Ms. Steward said. ''Maybe a year ago, I'd have talked back and had a bad attitude, but now I let it go through me and accept it.'' (She wrote a short essay for a Web page about the Zen Center's Sit-a-thon, a daylong meditation session planned for Saturday to raise money for the Awake Youth Project.)

Meditation's champions do not pitch it as a panacea. But they say it's worth a try.

''You're having someone look at this can of worms and having them recognize that can is them,'' said Caroline Contillo, director of the Interdependence Project, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group that, among other things, teaches meditation to former prisoners. ''What they do with that is up to them.''

On a recent Thursday afternoon session at the Erasmus Hall High School campus in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, a dozen students sat for 10 minutes, eyes closed, as traffic on Flatbush Avenue hissed and rumbled outside. Taxonomy charts and grammatical diagrams covered the walls around their ring of plastic chairs.

A boy unwrapped a chocolate bar, drawing the attention of the girl next to him. She smiled. He put his index finger to his lips.

Afterward, Mr. Snyder, a tall man with a round bald head and an easy smile, asked the students to describe their meditation experiences.

''For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could relieve the stress on my shoulders,'' said Jerome Barrett, 17, a broad-shouldered former football player. ''I felt cohesive.''

His classmates giggled. Then they discussed the process of feeling angry. The descriptions tumbled out.

''It feels hot,'' said one boy.

''Your head hurts after,'' said another.

''It takes you over,'' said a third. '' It becomes its own person.''

''The only thing that is keeping the emotion alive is your own thoughts,'' Mr. Snyder said. ''You keep churning it over and over again. Your thoughts do not care about you. They only want to perpetuate themselves.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTOS: Greg Snyder, a Zen-Buddhist priest, leads the Brooklyn Zen Center, where he teaches students to meditate and to deal with stress and anxiety. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARILYNN K. YEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Correction: April 20, 2012, Friday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: The City Room column on Monday, about high school students' participating in meditation sessions at the Brooklyn Zen Center, described the operation of the Awake Youth Project incorrectly and also misstated the way in which a student became involved with the center. The Awake Youth Project is a collaboration between the center and the Brooklyn College Community Partnership; it is not the Zen Center's program. And a student, La-keeyatta Steward, became affiliated with the center through an internship paid by the Brooklyn College Community Partnership; she was not assigned community service work there by a teacher at her high school.